Welcome to the new Blender Artists!
We’re super excited to welcome you to the updated Blender Artists forum! We’ve worked hard to copy over as much as possible from the old platform, and you should be able to log in with your existing password and join the conversation straight away.
That said, there are a few things that you should keep in mind:
- We’re still running some ‘housekeeping’ processes in the background, so some
- Any subscriptions you had to topics were not migrated, sorry! To learn how to set them up again, read our subscriptions migration guide.
How to give feedback
Despite extensive testing, you might run into some issues. If you find any problems, please check if it has already been reported in the site feedback forum and add your observations if necessary. If not, create a new topic. Please don’t double-post issues!
Design feedback is welcome in this forum too, but it will likely not be prioritized at this time.
What are some cool new features?
- Do you prefer a dark or a light theme? We’ve got you covered! Click on the ‘hamburger’ menu at the top right and select your favourite theme.
- Add some media to your post? To add an image, just drag the file into the message composer. YouTube, Vimeo and Sketchfab are also supported - just add a URL on an empty line and it will turn into a player.
- Log in with your Blender ID! As long as the email address of your Blender ID matches your email address here, we’ll log you straight in.
Why did we move to Discourse?
Discourse is a ‘next generation’ forum system that uses many modern techniques to give a much better (and more fun) user experience than ‘traditional’ forums. It’s open source and developed by the people who created Stack Exchange. They bring a LOT of community experience to the table, and everything they do is focused on providing a better environment for conversations and community.
I have been using Discourse for several years at Sketchfab and have fallen in love with it. The Blender Foundation is also using it as the new forum software for the developers community.
My favourite features are:
- Real time. New replies will automatically appear without reloading the page.
- Excellent notifications. You can subscribe to topics and tags and decide the level of notifications you want to receive for each. Notifications are provided on-side (real-time, of course), as browser notifications (if you’re not on BlenderArtists you can still receive important messages), or through email. Discourse is smart enough not to email you if you’ve already visited the topic.
- Mobile device support. All features work great on your phone and tablet too.
- Community moderation. Discourse gives the community tools to police itself. For example, If enough people flag posts as spam, off-topic or other, they’ll be hidden and moved into a moderation queue. All these tools are much more modern and easy to use than in vBulletin, and will result in a ‘cleaner’ experience for everyone. Discourse also has a fantastic ‘user level’ system, giving users more access as their reputation increases. Top-level users can even earn moderation rights etc. Spammers will have a hard time
- Editing posts. Discourse is based on MarkDown and provides a WYSIYWG editor with a live preview of your final layout. It also makes it much, much easier to embed other media. Just drag images into your post, or add a YouTube, Vimeo or Sketchfab link as you would on any other modern platform.
- Solved flag. Discourse lets the OP of a topic flag a reply as the solution of his request. This reply will be displayed at the top of the thread, making it easier for future readers to jump directly to the answer. With a clear ‘unsolved’ indicator in the topics list, this also makes it easier to identify which questions still need an answer.
- Badges! It may sound trivial, but badges can really help ‘document’ a person’s role in the community. Discourse can automatically award badges based on rules or queries, or they can be awarded manually. Good fun.
